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Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings?

Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

Its been all over the SEO-student rumor mill for weeks
now, and has finally made it into my Inbox in droves.

The new get-traffic-quick scheme for search engine results
has arrived flooding ping notification sites with update
announcements, even though your blog hasnt been updated.

The question is does this- or some variation of it work? If
not, where did this idea come from?

Okay, bad news first.

Pinging sites like Yahoo and Syndic8 every half-hour for
several days or weeks, to notify of updates when they
havent been made, does nothing but clog up the system.
Its called spam-pinging and it has been around since 2002.

If you havent updated your blog, or youre pinging updates
of a site that isnt even a blog (or RSS feed, where
applicable), in the long run its just going to make it
harder to get listed at these sites.

In the short run, you could get yourself banned from sites
like Yahoo, though it isnt officially their policy to drop
sites for spam-pinging.

Yet.

True, not all sites that have recently updated lists you
can ping to be on are set up to block pings of sites that
arent updated. But theyve found ways to block certain
sites and users before its only a matter of time.

So even in the unlikely event that you could find some way
to make this work temporarily, youd just be setting
yourself up to be dropped, in as little as a day in some
cases.

So if this method doesnt work, why are there tools
available to help you flood these directories?

Well, lets look at the situation logically.

Until the middle of 2004, certain adult web properties were
able to create several bogus blog sites in particular,
blogspot.com. Theyd found that the links leading back to
them from those sites helped their page rank in Google, as
well as their search results placement.

Although Google got wise to them and closed this loophole
by fall of this past year, several legitimate blog sites
have found that they continue to enjoy high rankings for
some keywords that are easier to get. Some people
erroneously assume that its because their updates appear
on Weblogs.com and/or in Bloggers Most Recently Updated
pages several times a day.

Having noticed that occasionally, they would get spidered
around the same time they posted, they realized that there
was a correlation between pinging and better search engine
listings.

And theyre not completely wrong there is a parallel. But
a parallel is not a cause. Its just one facet of the
relationship between blogs and getting better results in
Yahoo, Google and MSN.

Their frequency of updates had something to do with their
rankings, yes. But it is not what guarantees they get
spidered and if the blog isnt set up to take advantage
of the visit from the search engine spiders, they dont get
listed.

To begin to have an understanding of how to get similar
results for your site, you have to look at the bigger
picture. Spam-pinging isnt going to do it, and as Ive
said in other articles, there are other ethical, faster,
simpler ways to do this.

So what is this bigger picture?

First of all, blogs have a natural tendency to rank higher
in search engines because they

Have well-structured site architecture
Make use of anchor text linking
Are well linked,
Are frequently updated, and,
Are focused tightly around a narrow theme, among other
things.
Couple this with the ease of being able to get one-way
links from several sites favored by the search engines, and
you have two-thirds of the formula for a well-ranked blog.

However, just because these sites appear on publicly
displayed ping notification lists and other sites that keep
abreast of blog updates, this doesnt mean that you can get
away with pinging them without updating your site.

It also doesnt mean that sites that have authentically
updated and sent pings will appear in Google, Yahoo or MSN
simply from being frequently updated.

The good news is, you dont need to deluge the ping sites
to get noticed. Doing so is often a waste of time, and may
be a harmful one.

Your best bet for now is to continue to achieve your
natural search engine position through blogging, basic
search engine optimization, and a common sense approach to
frequent updates.

And yes, by the way, there IS an ethical way to get into
search engines and achieve high rankings with a blog, but
its not a matter of volume. Its more a matter of timing,
supply and demand. But explaining that process takes a
level of detail and an amount of space not available here.

------------------------------
Read about real, ethical back doors to higher rankings that
the search engines actually encourage you to use, free at
http://www.freetraffictip.com/goblog .

More articles by Tinu AbayomiPaul - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Tinu-AbayomiPaul-97/

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